• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 615 0

actually wearing a blindfold, a strip of red cloth that had been wound around his eyes and across his ears, but he seemed to know just where Magdelana was standing anyway. There were dark smudges on the material, although Magdelana couldn’t tell whether the smudges were blood or dirt. The newcomer was blind, and somehow even the blindfold was a joke, like a parody of somebody’s dust visor. The man was leaning against one of the big wooden gateposts, with his hands in his trouser pockets and his face turned towards Magdelana.

He’d walked right into the middle of the face‐off, and casually saved Magdelana’s life in the process.

Magdelana had no idea how to deal with that.

‘Are you an assigned defender?’ one of the riders asked.

The blind man raised an eyebrow. Magdelana watched it leap up from behind the cloth of the blindfold, then vanish again. She tried to work out how old the man was, but it was hard to tell anything about him with the blindfold there to distract you all the time. Definitely not one of the townspeople, except that somehow he’d ended up inside town limits. If he were an outsider – an offworlder, even – he’d have Came through the gate, and Magdelana would have heard about it. At least, that was the theory.

‘I’m not anything,’ the man said, and Magdelana didn’t immediately realise that he was talking to the riders. ‘I’m just passing through.’

Magdelana heard the sound of armour plates scraping together. Were the Remote people turning to look at each other? Scratching their heads? Aiming their weapons at the blind man?

She could have glanced over her shoulder, of course, but she couldn’t – wouldn’t – look into the sun again. Besides, the pain was running right through her leg and into the ground, rooting her to the spot. In front of her, the blind man reached into one of his waistcoat pockets, took out a gold‐edged pocket watch, and flipped open the lid. Every move he made looked casual, so relaxed it just had to be rehearsed. He bowed his head to look down at the watch.

‘Noon,’ he announced. His voice was slow and lazy, the kind of accent that sounded like it had been dozing in the sun for the last hundred years. ‘Noon my time, anyway. Still, I’ve been running fast for most of my life.’

‘You can’t see,’ one of the riders pointed out.

‘I don’t need to,’ said the blind man. ‘My watch doesn’t have any hands.’

The man was looking – looking? – over Magdelana’s shoulder now, fixing his attention on the riders. Magdelana wondered whether it was worth running, or even scrabbling in the dirt for the shotgun. She doubted it.

‘Are you armed?’ the second rider asked.

‘Armed?’ said the blind man.

‘We have to evaluate you as a threat. Your intervention suggests you wish to stop us fulfilling our mission.’

‘Oh, I see. No, I’m not armed. Primed, maybe. Not armed.’

‘Then we have to execute you. In addition to the first assigned defender.’

The man in the blindfold started pacing then, slowly walking up and down between the posts of the gate, kicking up the sawdust under his feet. He had his face turned down to the ground, lost in thought, and Magdelana wondered why the Remote didn’t kill him off straight away.

Eventually, he looked up. Smiled. Threw open his arms.

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘If you don’t leave us alone…’

He paused.

‘Yes?’ one of the riders prompted.

‘You won’t like it,’ said the blind man.

‘Carry on,’ the rider insisted.

The blind man shrugged. ‘I’ll blot out the sun,’ he said.

There was what may have been the most terrible pause in the whole history of humanity. In those moments of silence, Magdelana could almost imagine the dust creeping up her frozen leg, trying to drag her down into the guts of the planet now that it knew she couldn’t move.

‘Blot out the sun,’ one of the Remote men repeated.

The blind man nodded. ‘More or less.’

Another pause. Magdelana closed her eyes. She saw the sun again, hovering somewhere between her eyelids and her eyes. She saw her own crucified body against the light, and knew that, whoever the blind man may have been, he was entirely mad. And that was when